Predatory tactics in gaming are worse than you think
There aren't anywhere near enough of us here for there not not be an "overarching culture and ethos". There are few places on the Internet more ideologically consistent than this, frankly. Self-selection is a powerful force.
Yeah, no.
I like a bunch of games that do this. I've liked games that do this for 40 years.
I mean, technically you just banned all arcade games that ever existed. I liked a bunch of those.
And I like a bunch of free to play games. I spent a bunch of time playing Hearthstone. I'm gonna say that at least some of the millions of people in LoL would like to keep playing what they're playing. I am looking forward to a bunch of new characters in Street Fighter 6. I kinda don't want to go back to the days where I had to buy a second full price copy of Street Fighter 2 just to get access to 4 new characters.
I get that it sounds good to say this when thinking about the worst parts of the industry, but... yeah, no.
I think from the game development side there are pros and cons. There are games that struggle to demand a high enough sticker price that do better under a subscription service.
The problem is that, much like subscriptions elsewhere, these are deliberately underpriced and used as a loss leader to sink competitors and the direct purchase market, so they aren't priced reasonably and it's unclear what the money flow towards creators is supposed to be.
And it'd be one thing if the money was flowing at all, but in the current industry, with Microsoft shedding people left and right while holding a ridiculous amount of IP, both active and inactive... well, it's not a great look for the industry as a whole to be dumping content below cost for the sake of a speculative move. And to make matters worse, I don't think that many people know just exactly how much of a money pit Game Pass is.
And that's before the more fundamental issues with ownership and preservation. Which I have strong feelings about, it's just that they happen to be so strong that I'm typically the one to remind people you don't own your Steam games, either. Would certainly like a fix for that, too.
That'd be great if it didn't disagree with all available evidence. For all of history patriots have been either cannon fodder or abusive tyrants. On a long enough trajectory, almost inevitably nationalists and eventually imperialists.
One could argue that, much like some flavors of political utopia, internationalism has the advantage of never having been implemented in any practical sense, so they have less of a challenge proving their positive impact, but I'll take it anyway.
Regardless, I find that "making their country better" should be a distant second to "making the world better", and perhaps a close third behind "making the crap you have on hand and the lives of those immediately around you better".
Look, I am not a globalist anarchist. I believe in well structured, effective democratic governments. Maybe I was the right age to look at the EU and think that those don't have to be held to the absurd liberal idea of the nation-state,and that wherever a collective of humans have a common interest there should be governance structured to work with other layers of organization to improve things and enforce rights within that sphere. There is nothing magical about the nation-state layer of government that makes it more spiritually attuned to identity or the needs of the people. It's all administrative stuff as far as I'm concerned.
I'm guessing that's the equivalent of a human going on a cruise and spending the entire thing in the buffet table.
I support this. Seagulls belong in the trash anyway and the human versions should be in isolated vessels out in the ocean as well.
Yeah, well, that depends on who gained independence from whom and whether you think you're independent now. Also on whether you'd be indepedendent from any guys who'd like to be independent from the now guys if they were to be independent.
See, political independence for a group requires that you align with the idea the group has of itself. I don't know that I have that overlap with any particular political delineation, so I may need an organization a touch more nuanced than an independent, sovereign nation-state.
Also, gonna need some citation on the lack of creepy vibe, as mentioned above.
Over here the only similar events I can think of are related to joining the military and taking elected office. And there was significant legal arguing about the last one, to the point where opt-outs and strict limitations were added.
We have one of those, and it'd be creepy even if historically it wasn't debatable that the event itself was for the better.
I don't know that I agree with this.
Perhaps coming from a place where the notion of "country" and "nation" don't overlap one to one makes it easier to see. I wouldn't really be able to tell you what "my nation" even is, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
I respect and take pride in culture in all its diversity and complexity, in democracy and in the general sense of human decency. Screw all the so-called nations trying to get me to vouch for them as a political unit, though. Political organization is for buiding roads and hospitals, not for pride.
Not being American I always found the whole thing very creepy. Like, North Korean military parade-creepy.
For the record, we don't have anything like that where I'm from, but the closest things we do have are also very creepy. Patriotism in general is extremely not cool, honestly.
Cool.
But the pitch wasn't "everything will be interoperable unless the company doesn't mean it or wants to make money or we aren't "morally aligned", whatever that means".
I don't understand how you can be a "walled garden" and still feature interoperability with a set of open source platforms under a pre-established set protocol. This is not an ethical problem or a problem of ideology, those two things are mutually exclusive.
This also sounds a whole lot like it disproves skrlet13's point on the heterogeneous Fedi where everything fits under different but overlapping bubbles. Seems to me you think Fedi has the one moral and ethical position on this.
They already had a FPS counter on Windows, but they've expanded that with CPU/GPU/RAM usage, a frametime graph and that separate FPS/DLSS frame counter. No battery stats, surprisingly, even on handhelds.
I don't know what they're wrapping on Windows, but they definitely have decent access, and yeah, the Nvidia overlay sometimes loses the FPS counter where Steam keeps it on Windows. Don't ask me how that works.
Yeah, we're almost there. If you buy a pre-packaged box with Home Assistant you're most of the way there. If you look under the hood most commercial NAS options and even some routers are scraping that territory as well.
I think the way it needs to work to go mainstream is you buy some box that you plug in to your router and it just sets up a handful of (what looks to you) like web services you can access from anywhere. No more steps needed.
The biggest blockers right now are that everybody in that space is too worried giving you the appearance of control and customizability to go that hard towards end-user focus... and that for some reason we as a planet are still dragging our feet on easily accessible permanent addresses for average users and still relying on hacks and workarounds.
The tech is there, though. You could be selling home server alternatives to the could leaning into enshittification annoyance with the tech we have today. There's just nobody trying to do an iServe because everybody is chasing that subscription money instead, and those who aren't are FOSS nerds that want their home server stuff to look weird and custom and hard.
Yeah, that sucks. I've had it get stuck trying to update Proton for a game that no longer existed on an external drive. Steam definitely isn't as "works every time out of the box" as people around here like to claim, and its reliance on reproducing itself to its last state, even if that state is broken, can be super annoying.
But hey, I still think having access to all the games it can run in your system should be the default, even if it warns you when you are doing so under Proton.
As far as I understand it the option remain on the menu, they just changed the default.
I would have been less annoyed at the default being off if the client asked you if you want to switch it on when you click on a non-native game. They instead have the toggle hidden away in their already cluttered and annoying Settings menu, at least on the desktop version.
Likewise, I think the answer to your issue would be to just give you a warning splash screen when booting under Proton the first time. That's fairly established UX language on Steam, they do the same when you hit the controller compatibility layer for the first time and when you try to play games with small UI elements on handheld.
I never encountered that, but Steam can get weirdly stuck on a Proton update or setting if you start manually messing with its library folders. For as much as people like their contributions to the ecosystem it's still a private, for-profit storefront and they're not particularly keen on you fiddling with it or in supporting you when/if you do.
That said, I haven't had that issue. In theory Proton shouldn't mess with your native software regardless of your options setting being on or off. Presumably even with it defaulted to on if you switch it off manually things would go back to showing all non-native software as "unavailable" again, right?
Oh. Well, no duh.
Did they ever explain why this wasn't on by default before? Was there a practical reason for it at all? It's one of those things you do once and never think about again, but it's weird that you even had to.
I guess maybe they thought that having some games try to launch and fail by default would look bad? They've recently added compatibility ratings to non-SteamOS Linux systems, so maybe that's the difference now? Still a weirdly annoying choice originally, though.
It's about time they ported their Deck performance viewer back to other platforms. It's still a bit touch and go whether it picks up some things. No GPU readout under Linux, for example, as far as I can tell, at least with an Nvidia GPU.
The DLSS stuff is interesting, but it wasn't much of a secret before. They took the way they present it from the generally amazing Lossless Scaling and, if anything, I like that you can now compare their solution to DLSS apples-to-apples. I'm a bit confused about their graph display, though. I'm guessing the red line is supposed to be native frames and green is all frames? That's a bit weird, since the color coding on the text is backwards from that.
As a side note, it's weird and has always been weird that Steam's performance monitor has a way better time picking up apps than Nvidia's on Windows. You'd think owning the drivers would give you the edge, but nope.
Yeah, that's exactly where it comes from. And it fits just fine for people like you, doing it for a living. It's just a bit obnoxious when us normies dabbling with what is now fairly approachable hobbyist home networking try to cosplay as that. I mean, come on, Brad, you're not unwinding after work with more server stuff, you just have a Plex and a Pi-hole you mess around with while avoiding having actual face time with your family.
And that's alright, by the way. I think part of why the nomenclature makes me snarky is that I actually think we're on the cusp of this stuff being very doable by everybody at scale. People are still running small services in dedicated Raspberry Pis and buying proprietary NASs that can do a bunch of one-button self-hosting. If you gave it a good push you could start marketing self-contained home server boxes as a mainstream product, it's just that the people doing that are more concerned with selling you a bunch of hard drives and the current batch of midcore users like me are more than happy to go on about their "homelab" and pretend they're doing a lot more work than they actually are to keep their couple of docker containers running.
Wait, in what world is a subscription a "rational consumer purchasing decision" where buying characters for a fighting game if you want them as they come out is not?
I would prefer to pay for in-game content of any kind, cosmetics included, over paying a subscription for a game. Any day. Especially if the content is characters, as is the case in LoL or Street Fighter.
And yeah, I bought three 3D Street Fighter games. And a bunch of characters for each. Even a costume or two. I am extremely on board with that. Money extremely well spent, as far as I'm concerned.
Hell, the SF6 community at the moment is begging for more cosmetics. They just announced a handful of horny-ass swimsuit costumes and people went ballistic. It's not my bag, but if people like them and they know what they're buying who the hell are you to tell them they're wrong, let alone that it should be illegal?
I mean, it's a straightforward enough transaction. You think bikini Cammy with tan lines is hot and will pay some money for that skin. I get subsidized by your teenage hormones and keep playing the game I like. Win/win in my book.
That's the problem with this train of thought. There's some stuff where you and I agree there are bad practices and we can probably agree on some common sense regulation for them. But if you're going to come at me with a maximalist approach that boils down to "games I don't like shouldn't exist" we're going to disagree.
Which, if nothing else, is a good reason for regulation of creative products to be relatively loose whenever possible. I was not on board with Hillary wanting to ban Mortal Kombat in the 90s because she didn't like hearts being ripped out and I'm not on board with people wanting to ban free to play games now. It made sense to have age ratings in the 90s and it makes sense to have that and other common sense regulations now.